‘Burial’ Review: A Ghoulish Military Mission in the Last Days of World War 2

variety.com:

Dennis Harvey Film CriticNazi ghouls have figured in plenty of horror movies, whether preserved (1966’s “The Frozen Dead”), newly bioengineered (1978’s “The Boys from Brazil”) or zombiefied (too many to list).

Edging close to that terrain, “Burial” revolves around a corpse — the corpse, as far as WWII’s end was concerned — that does not reanimate or otherwise come “back to life,” but poses a grave threat nonetheless.Not-quite-horror despite its macabre theme and mood, this sophomore directorial feature for Ben Parker is a handsomely produced period thriller that delivers in terms of action and atmospherics, even if his somewhat convoluted story doesn’t maximally pay off.

IFC Midnight is releasing the Estonia-shot U.K. production to limited U.S. theaters and on-demand platforms Sept. 2. A framing device set in 1991 London has elderly Anna (Harriet Walter, in a role first given to Diana Rigg before her 2020 death) disturbed one night by an intruder.

No helpless spinster, she soon has the skinhead-looking young perp (David Alexander) cuffed to her radiator. He’s somehow discovered she used to be Brana, a Soviet intelligence officer and translator, and says, “I know what you found in Berlin.” But he doesn’t know, really, and it is worth her while to inform this neo-Nazi goon of the myth-dissolving truth while he’s her captive audience.Forty-six years earlier, as the Third Reich lay in ruins but peace had not yet been declared, Brana (now played by Charlotte Vega) was the lone female in a Red Army unit assigned to carry out a mission so secret even they don’t know its real purpose at first.